Seagate Launches 60TB Monster: World’s Largest SSD Revealed

Seagate has recently unveiled the 60-terabyte monster SSD. This is now the world’s largest when it comes to Solid State Drive (SSD). The company stated that the drive is to provide the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash memory usage today. This new Seagate’s monster 60TB solid-state drive (SSD) breezes past Samsung’s 15TB SSD that was launched in March. The new drive is set to join the high-performance end of Seagate’s datacenter range.

Seagate earlier this year launched a 10Gbps SSD under the Nytro brand which met the Open Compute Project’s specs. While no one, for now, knows when Seagate will start the production of the 60TB SSD, Seagate may have partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise concerning its production. Seagate mentioned that the 60TB SSD is presently only a “demonstration technology” for now although the company may start releasing the product for commercial use as early as next year

Form Factor

The Samsung’s PM1633a comes with a 2.5-inch form factor and is able holds data of up to 15.36TB. Although, it still remains the largest commercially available SSD. It costs about $10,000 per unit.

The Seagate 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD comes with the familiar HDD 3.5-inch form factor. The company stated that the solid state drive has four times the capacity and twice the density of Samsung’s PM1633a. The SSD will be capable of storing about 12,000 movies or 400 million photos.

The 3.5-inch form factor that came with the Seagate 60TB SSD will be very helpful in managing requirements of changing storage in data centers. It has already eliminated the need to support different form factors for cold data and hot. Seagate said that capacity could be scaled up to about 100TB even with this same form factor.

Memory Chip

Concerning the memory chips, the Seagate drive makes use of Micron’s latest NAND flash. Due to the large storage density of the drive, there are not many possible options.

Performance and Power Consumption

No specific details are available on either longevity or performance, drives of this size but usually steer clear of performance in favor of longevity. Concerning power consumption, the 60TB SSd may consume up to 1W per terabyte. Other enterprise SSDs tend to consume around 2W-per-TB at idle.

Seagate also unveiled the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD, which was targeted at the so-called hyper-scale data centers and to cater for applications which involve big data analytics and high-performance computing. This device will be sold by Seagate partners later in the year.

Price

The Seagate 60TB SAS SSD proves to be an exciting possibility to help customers in achieving higher capacity configurations and server storage performance never seen before. Pricing may be from £30,000 or $40,000 which is about £0.50 per GB. This is still fairly reasonable.